Monday, February 14, 2011

Patterns :: Velox Amœnum :: I:17

So often in this blog I have discussed word order in Horace’s poems—how it seems, to me as a language learner, an impenetrable barrier to the meaning. Like brambles, his seemingly scrambled word order catches me every time and I fail to understand what he is saying.

Then a few weeks ago, I came across a book written almost a hundred years ago by an Australian, Henry Darnley Naylor, called Horace:Odes and Epodes; A Study in Poetic Word-Order. Meticulously, Mr. Naylor has gone over what Horace wrote and extracted sentence pattern after sentence pattern. Like some structuralist method of language learning so popular in the fifties and sixties (the so-called audio-lingual method), the author presents his readers with more than fifty patterns.

He writes this in his introduction [pg. xiii] about the order of words in Latin poetry:

Suppose we enter a room and see upon a table a red flower in a silver bowl, what makes more impression on the mind? Is it the antithetical colours, red and silver, and the antithetical objects, flower and bowl? Or is it the antithesis of the combinations, red flower and silver bowl? English decides for the latter; Latin poetry, more often, for the former; and, with rare exceptions, the two colours, literal or metaphorical, are put first and the two objects last. Thus while prose might write flos purpureus stat in lance argentea, poetry will prefer the order purpureus argentea stat flos in lance . . . .

Mr. Naylor goes on to say that such a grouping in prose is quite rare but commonplace in poetry. Then with this example, he begins to set out an array of patterns, each one carefully indexed to Horace’s odes and epodes.

Now, at last, after struggling with Horace’s turns of phrase for so long, I have something to hold on to. I even feel like writing audio-lingual-like transformation drills, as I had done as a teacher in Peace Corps, to engrain these patterns in my head. Okay, if you are a language teacher, you know the limits of methods based on behavior modification versus cognitively-based ones, still you might find some use for a transformation drill like this, following Mr. Naylor’s pattern #21 (for which he gives some 348 examples from Horace!):

Reorder the following phrases so that the adjective precedes and is separated from the noun it modifies.

Example:Nec colubras viridis metuunt >

Nec viridis metuunt colubras [answer: v. Hor.I:17:8]

1 Per scelus nostrum patimur [v. Hor.I:3:39]

2 Nec prata pruinis canis albicant [v. Hor.I:4:4]

3 Mors pede aequo pulsat [v. Hor.I:4:13]

4 Cui comam flavam religas [v. Hor.I:5:4]

5 Cras aequor ingens iterabimus [v. Hor.I:7:32]

6 Cur campum apricum oderit [v. Hor.I:8:3,4]

7 Cum ad oscula flagrantia detorquet [v. Hor.II:7:25]

8 Aut lyncas timidos agitare [v. Hor.II:13:40]

As for today’s ode, it is written to Tyndaris, a woman Horace knows. It seems to be an invitation to come to his farm in the hills not far from Rome. There the air is cool even in the heat of summer. The goats (which Horace describes as husbands and wives) roam freely. The sounds of the woods, the running streams all make music. There will be singing and wine and thoughts of love. An idyllic scene, but all along there is danger: green serpents, wolves, storms, and the violence of a lover ready to tear the flower crown from his mate’s hair and rip away her innocent clothes.

Lycaeus: mountain in Arcadia where Jupiter and Pan [Faunus] were worshipped, now called Lykaion, although some insist that it is Diaphorti. Lykaion is related to the French word lycée (Lyceum).

Lucretilis: hill in the Sabine country, now Monte Gennaro; on its slopes was Horace’s farm.

Ustica: was a small hill in the Sabine country near Horace’s villa, perhaps a village, the modern Licenza on the hill opposite Horace’s villa, according to Sidney Alexander’s The Complete Odes and Satires of Horace, 1999, pg. 321.

Copia: the goddess of abundance.

Teius: belonging to Teos, birthplace of Anacreon (poet, fl. 540 B.C.)

Circe / Penelope: Ulysses spent a year with Circe before going back to his wife Penelope.

Semele: daughter of Cadmus and mother of Bacchus by Jupiter.

Thyoneus: son of Thyone, i.e., Bacchus.

Cyrus: the name of an unknown youth. See ode I:33, blog March 20, 2010.